Najma Heptulla

Najma Heptulla, Heptulla also spelled Heptullah, (born April 13, 1940, Bhopal, India), Indian politician, government official, social advocate, and writer, who occupied prominent positions in both the Indian National Congress (Congress Party) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and long served in the Rajya Sabha (upper chamber of the Indian parliament).

Heptulla was raised in Bhopal, in what became Madhya Pradesh state in west-central India. She was the grandniece of the renowned Islamic scholar and Indian independence activist Abdul Kalam Azad. In 1960 she received a master’s degree in zoology from a college in Bhopal and two years later earned a Ph.D. in cardiac anatomy. In 1980 Heptulla, inspired by Indira Gandhi, joined the Congress (I)—the designation given to Gandhi’s faction of the Congress Party from 1978 until “I” was dropped in 1996—and that year ran for and won a seat in the Rajya Sabha from Maharashtra state. She was reelected to that chamber five more times between 1986 and 2012.

Heptulla served as general secretary of the party (1986–87) and twice as the party’s spokesperson (1986–87 and 1998). In January 1985 she was elected to a one-year term as the deputy chairman of the Rajya Sabha, and she again served in that post from late 1988 to mid-2004. Between 1995 and 1999 she was on the Executive Committee of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (an international organization of national legislative bodies) and from 1999 to 2002 was its president. She also served as the special envoy of the Indian prime minister on visits to foreign countries, notably in the Middle East.

Heptulla became increasingly close to the BJP during that party’s leadership of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition government in New Delhi (1999–2004), and in 2000 the NDA appointed her the head of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR). Her association with the BJP led to her gradual estrangement from the Congress Party, which included a public falling-out with Congress leader Sonia Gandhi. In June 2004 Heptulla resigned from Congress, joined the BJP, and won a seat in the Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan state. The previous month, however, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) had been successful in elections to the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament) and had formed a coalition government. Heptulla not only lost her deputy chairmanship in the chamber but also stepped down as the head of the ICCR after her term ended in 2005.

Heptulla nevertheless rose quickly in the BJP leadership. In 2007 the party fielded her as a candidate for the vice presidency of India, though she lost the election to the UPA nominee, Hamid Ansari. She was appointed as one of the BJP’s 13 vice presidents in 2010 under Nitin Gadkari, then president of the party. Heptulla left the Rajya Sabha when her term ended in 2010, but she was again elected to the chamber from Madhya Pradesh in 2012. By 2013, however, her position within the party had appeared to decline under the new party president, Rajnath Singh. In March Heptulla was dropped from the position of BJP vice president and was made a member of the party’s national executive. Following the BJP’s landslide victory in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Heptulla was named to the cabinet of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the minister of minority affairs. She left that post in 2016, and later that year she was appointed governor of Manipur.

Heptulla earned a reputation over the years as a strong advocate of women’s empowerment. In 1992 she presided over the Conference of Women Parliamentarians of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association in New Delhi. Three years later she played an active role in the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. In addition, she headed the Indian delegation to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in 1997, and that same year she received a special invitation to the International Women’s Leadership Conference at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Heptulla wrote or edited a number of publications, including India’s Progress in Science and Technology: Continuity and Change (1986), Indo-West Asian Relations: The Nehru Era (1991), and Reforms for Women: Future Options (1992).